I’ve notoriously been someone who has avoided painting my models. It’s an inside joke within our local meta. It’s also stopped me from going to tournaments (among other reasons) and Adepticon events. For 4th edition Age of Sigmar, I was inspired by all of my local friends really getting into painting their first AoS armies and I must have caught the bug. I started off painting up some skeletons for my Soulblight Gravelords army and then moved onto the Blood Knights. Lots of trial and error. Lots of layers of paint to hide mistakes. Lots of short cuts. In the end, though, I was actually really happy with what I’d accomplished.

Let’s just ignore the depth of field issues in my photography.

After playing a few games with Soulblight, I realized I wasn’t really digging their play style, so I went to my massive backlog and tried to figure out where I would go next. I felt like going with something a bit more organic in feel so I could get away with being a little bit sloppy with my paint as I learned, so I learned towards Seraphon and Sylvaneth. The trees tended to be a little more skill reliant and with the new edition being new rules, I wanted to not make things harder for me than they already would be. Thus, I landed on DINOSAURS.

I’ve been playing and collecting Seraphon off and on throughout my time playing Age of Sigmar and the … derpiness of the regular troops really kept me from going all in. When the most recent model refresh dropped last edition, I jumped in with both feet and got super into it. Unfortunately, around that time was also around when 10th Edition 40k dropped and that sucked up all of the oxygen for not only my local group but also the majority of the people I discussed games with. Dinosaurs went back onto the shelf for another day.

My original concept was to take one of the GW suggested concept of having the warriors “glowing from the inside” and I started to toy with a different take on their actual colors. The dark blue with light blue glow was a little one note, so I wanted to expand on that. Unfortunately, my concept was a bit more complex than my abilities would allow for.

I tried many different combinations and was getting a little discouraged. When I built and painted Gundam models, I never would paint the “box art” version and I felt like I needed to do something unique. Realizing I was still dipping my toe into painting again, I decided to just go with the standard color scheme in order to find my way back into the groove. I ended up watching quite a few YouTube videos from creators who utilized a combination of Contrast Paint methods along with regular painting to do finishing touches. It also helped that Marina created an awesome contrast painting guide using the Marvel Crisis Protocol models when we first picked up that box.

This method really resonated with me and I ended up doing several test models in order to find a recipe that worked best. I was getting a little frustrated because most of the recipes Warhipster and others were giving me were way too dark and I wasn’t getting the look I was going for. I then realized I was using older Seraphon sculpts and the paint ended up looking much different once I moved onto the newer ones. At that point I started to batch mix a bunch of pots of custom colors and started to assembly line my warriors.

Now we were cooking with fire! The army is still in progress, but I feel like I’m really getting a handle on what I want to do with them. After my first game yesterday, I’m changing up my list ideas slightly and it means I’ll have to get a couple other critters built out and primed so we can start painting them up. I’ll post a few more pictures below to show my progress as of today and I’ll keep posting updates as they happen.

Hope this was interesting! If there are any thoughts or suggestions of things you’d like to see on these posts, I’ll be making a contact form in the future for folks to send along suggestions. Unfortunately, comments sections are a moderation nightmare, so I am avoiding them for now.